


The Only One With Eyes

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [317]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Allusions To Pedophelia By One of Ani's Clients Who's A Creep, Alternate Universe - 19th Century, Angst, Artistic Frustration, Attraction, Inspiration, M/M, Painter!Obi-Wan, Penetrative Sex, Prostitution, There's Not As Much Age Difference Here as Obi-Wan Thinks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:00:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 14,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21859456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: The boy is on the tram again today, his cheek pressed against the unwashed window and his eyes--oh, his eyes, the little glimpse his reflection to Obi-Wan gives--are half-closed and full of melancholy.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker
Series: Mental Mimosa [317]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1012767
Comments: 97
Kudos: 448





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Poet/Painter. Prompt from this [generator.](https://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator)
> 
> If you are new to the MM series, a) welcome! and b) please take a moment to read about how the series works [here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1012767).

The boy is on the tram again today, his cheek pressed against the unwashed window and his eyes--oh, his eyes, the little glimpse his reflection to Obi-Wan gives--are half-closed and full of melancholy. Truly, he is a creature of art.

He is gangly, in the way boys becoming young men are, but his body is neatly folded into the seat. When a _hausfrau_ settles next to him at 30th Street, there’s plenty of room for her to sit; when the ‘car hits a bump, he helps her steady her grocery bag and returns her smile with a small, solemn nod before turning back to window, unhappiness descending again.

In the haze of the tram, the dark hands of coming twilight, Obi-Wan is aching to touch. He imagines it as he smokes: the weight of the boy’s chin resting on his fingers, the sprawl of his hips bare beneath a folded sheet, the gleam in his eyes--for there would be one, no question--when Obi-Wan was satisfied with the lines he’d created and stepped back to pick up his brush.

“You just want me to sit here,” he imagines the boy saying, cutting his eyes at the back of Obi-Wan’s canvas. “Just sit. That’s it?”

“Of course, _lieb_. How can I make art from you otherwise? Close your mouth for me now and be still. Just sit.”

He has dwelled in this daydream far too often lately, has followed down all the paths to explore where this moment might go. Once, in church, when the sermon was particularly dull, the path had ended with his brush on the boy’s skin, red and blue snaking up his chest and twirling down his thighs until the boy was touching him with purple fingers and breathing hard against his mouth, smiling, saying: “Come on me, Obi-Wan, right now. Do it. _Come_.”

Which was all very well expect Qui-Gon had been sitting beside him and apparently he’d made an ungodly sound and that plus the three tutorials he was behind in had earned him a lecture that had ended on what was for him an especially sour note:

“ _Schüler_ ,” his teacher had said in that smooth voice that was so much worse than shouting, “let me state what I hope is obvious to us both at present: you are not where you should be.”

His ears had pricked red. “I know, master.”

“I know you know. Which is why I find your behavior at present all the more troubling.” A hand on his shoulder, warm and fatherly strong. “Your talent alone is not enough; you must have discipline in order to make great art--not just once, but for a lifetime. You have it in you to do this, Obi-Wan, I am certain you do, but my certainty will not put your brush to canvas. Only you can do that.”

“I want to paint.” He’d lifted his eyes to find his master’s and prayed there weren’t tears there. “More than anything, but I can’t. These last few months, it’s like my mind is made of stone, as if I’ve forgotten what the colors are for. I sketch and I sketch but when I move to the canvas, it’s as if”--it felt silly to say it; worse to keep it in--“as if the light of whatever inspiration I once had has gone out.”

Qui-Gon had squeezed his shoulder and stepped away, leaned back against his big, mahogany desk. His office windows were open to the last of the autumn sun; below, on the green, the happy cackle of students between lectures, calling and shouting to each other--imbued, Obi-Wan thought miserably, with the sort of spirit for learning he had once had, one that the years and miles of empty canvas had slowly snuffed out.

“Well then, my _schüler_ ,” Qui-Gon said after a moment, “you must not wait for the muse to find you again. It is not her job to come to you, eh? It’s up to you to seek her out.”

“Master, I’ve been looking!”

“Of course you have. That’s precisely the problem.” His master had turned towards the windows, his spectacles catching the light. “Take some time, Kenobi, and rest your eyes from the searching. Only then may you see her again.”

It was just the sort of enigmatic, romantic twaddle that had once appealed to Obi-Wan, that had brought him out of the sharp, sullen hills of home to the doors of the Academy, the place where for nearly five years, he’d studied and created and wept. But now, as the appointed end of his studies drew near, all he could hear was the hollow in his master’s words, the spaces where perhaps meaning had once stood but in its place now lay only the last echoes of wisdom or sense.

“Take some time,” Qui-Gon repeated, “from now until the beginning of next term. Live your life and rest your eyes. The muse will come.”

*****

A month had passed of quiet, drunken desperation. He’d been drunk and he’d fucked and he’d lain on the roof of his building shivering beneath unseeing stars and he’d felt nothing but a dull, awful ache.

And then one day, riding the streetcars for hours blindly, he’d seen the boy.

*****

The _hausfrau_ gets up at the junction and in the shuffle of bodies on and off, the decision is easy to make.

Two steps and a brief shuffle and he’s sinking into the seat beside the boy, his heart joyfully pounding, the cold of the day softening the heat in his face.

“Would you like a cigarette?”

The boy’s eyes move; his head doesn’t. “I’m surprised you have any left.”

“Excuse me?”

“Seems to me you’ve smoked the whole lot since we passed Riverside.”

What in the seven hells. How did he know that? “I, ah. Not quite. Still have two.”

He can see the boy smirk in the window. “You offering me both?”

“Not hardly.”

“Too bad. I might have gone home with you if you had.”

He turns, this strange boy does, the boy with the deep, broken eyes, and oh, god in heaven, Obi-Wan thinks, heat in his throat, in his head. This boy will eat him alive.

“Might have?” he manages. His cigarette case is shaking in his fist.

“Yeah.” An easy smile--a false one, something in him warns, loudly--one he wants to be the cause of, always. “Depends.”

“On what?”

The ‘car jolts and they start moving again, a crush of chatter and rustling newspapers around them.

“On how good your tobacco is, for one thing.” The boy’s eyes flick to his mouth. “And the way that you smoke. You can tell a lot about somebody by the way that they suck it in.”

“You don’t have to lay it on so thick.”

Slim fingers pluck at his case and tug out a cig. “I don’t, huh?”

“No," Obi-Wan hears himself say. "I’m sold.”

He snaps a match and their gaze meets over it as the paper catches and Obi-Wan knows that he will touch that mouth before the night is out. He will have that mouth on his skin. He will watch that mouth fall open as he pushes in and he will see its pretty twist in ecstasy. Tonight, he will make this boy come.

And if that means he has to part with some of the few _deutschmarks_ he has left, if that means he won’t eat tomorrow, well--

The boy blows a string of smoke between them. “What’s your name?”

“Obi-Wan. Yours?”

“Anakin.”

He repeats it for some reason, rolls the word in his mouth. “Anakin.”

“Mmmhmm.” Somebody pulls the bell; they stop. “So, you got a home to take me back to?”

“That’s a strange question.”

“No, not really. It’s a backhanded way of asking if you’ve got a wife. You wouldn’t believe how many guys try to talk me into some godforsaken back alley.”

He can feel himself flush; tries to hide it behind his last cigarette. “They, ah. They do?”

The boy laughs. “Yeah, they do. I’ll let ‘em sometimes, depends.”

“On what?”

A shrug. “You know. On how hard up I am.”

There’s something about the casual nature of the words, the everyday way that the boy--Anakin--talks about letting other people use him that makes Obi-Wan’s stomach turn. He wonders as he breathes in tobacco and stale winter sweat what cruelties the world has hurled at Anakin to bring him to such a low place as that.

 _A low place_ , a small voice inside him says, _where you’re only too glad to meet him, aren’t you_?

 _Yes, well._ He tries to brush the thought away. _Never mind about that._

He feels a hand on his knee and Anakin’s looking at him again, smiling, as the car shrieks to a halt. “Heidecker Place. Isn’t this your stop?”

He’s gaping, he knows it. “How did you--?”

Then Anakin’s on his feet, a bolt of sudden movement; he pulls Obi-Wan to his and shoves none too gently until Obi-Wan’s stumbling into the aisle. 

“Come on,” Anakin says in his ear as they push through the scrum. “You’re not the only one with eyes, Obi-Wan. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. Come on.”


	2. Chapter 2

His rooms are cold; even the chill of the street had seemed nicer. And there isn’t exactly a maid. 

“It’s a mess,” Obi-Wan says sheepishly, gesturing at the newspaper-covered chairs, the empty easel, the neat plies of old paints. “My apologies.”

“It’s all right,” Anakin says. He reaches for his muffler as Obi-Wan lights a lamp. “I’ve seen worse.”

“That is hardly reassuring.”

A grin. “But I’ve hardly been anyplace colder, if that helps.”

“No,” Obi-Wan says, moving to the silent stove and flushing at the implication, the reminder that his home is one of many into which the boy has been invited. “It does not.”

It take five matches and a string of curses to get the fire going. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Anakin slowly circling the room, peering at everything and notably touching nothing, but when the flames finally catch at last, Anakin’s feet are still; he’s staring at the painting hung beside the bedroom door.

“What is this?” he asks.

“What does it look like to you?”

That gets him a look. “That’s a teacher’s question.”

“Well,” Obi-Wan says, "maybe I am a teacher. Had you considered that?”

“No.” Anakin turns back to the wall. “Because you’re obviously not.”

“How can you be sure that I’m--?”

“You painted this, didn’t you?”

He opens his mouth, closes it. More sorcery from the boy; was he really so easy to read? “I, uh. I did, yes.”

The boy snorts. “You painted it and you don’t know what it is?”

“Of course I know what it--! Look, it isn’t a _thing_ , Anakin. It’s not a picture of a thing, like a clock or a river or a person. It’s a--it’s a portrait of a feeling, if you like.”

“And what feeling is that?” 

A question he’s been asked in the past by peers and masters alike and earned only mockery, but from Anakin, remarkably, Obi-Wan hears only curiosity. So he answers in kind.

“I know what I was feeling when I painted it,” he says, coming to stand at the Anakin’s side, “but the more interesting question is: what do you feel when you look at it? What feeling does it evoke in you?”

“Unsettled, I think,” Anakin says after a moment. “Off-balance, but not in a bad way, necessarily--almost like the moment right after you almost slip on the ice or fall down the stairs. Almost, but don’t. Like you’ve escaped something that should frighten you but instead it makes you feel, oh, I don’t know. More alive.” He looks at Obi-Wan, studies him just as closely. “What were you feeling when you made it?”

“Interestingly, I was nervous. Excited. It was my first week in Dusseldorf, my first week at school.” He finds himself smiling at the memory, at the boy. “I felt as if I were about to conquer the world”

“So I got it right.” 

“Art isn’t a test, Anakin.”

“Maybe it is.” His hand finds Obi-Wan’s face. It’s slim and impossibly cold. “In this case it is, at least. It feels like a test about you.”

He folds his fingers around Anakin’s wrist. “You’re freezing.”

“Yeah,” the boy says, bold, his smirk a summer’s bloom, “so why don’t you warm me up?”

“I was going to pour us some wine.”

“Save it for later.”

“Later?” He sounds like he’s already drunk.

“Mmmm, later.” Anakin’s arms find his waist, his breath the bristle of Obi-Wan’s neck. “After you come down my throat.”

There are a thousand reasons he shouldn’t want this, that he shouldn’t be shaking in this boy’s practised embrace--he should be saving Anakin from the circumstances that have brought him here, to the house of a stranger; he should be helping the boy to set his life right. But instead, instead, Obi-Wan is potter’s clay in knowing hands that sink into his hair and creep under his shirt and pull all the sense from his body until all that’s left is hunger woven from daydreams, daydreams that are here now, and real.

“Kiss me, Obi-Wan,” Anakin says against his mouth, warm and beautiful and so brightly alive, and oh, God in heaven, what strength has he left against that?

None. None.


	3. Chapter 3

Most men who nod Anakin’s way want to fuck him. By the time they get their trousers down, they’re so hot for what they haven’t had that they’re finished after a shove or two, so intent on their own pleasure that they even pawed at his dick. He’s had more than one come before they even made it inside. But they’re the quickest to pay him, men like that, and the quickest to remember the error of their ways. They turn away with hot faces and dirty hands and leave him to clean up the mess. They’re pathetic, most of them, but at least it’s over quick; sometimes, he can roll three or four in a night.

Others, though, want to linger. They want to strip him off and lay him out in their beds and play at being lovers. Anakin can’t stand men like that. Oh, they tell themselves that their touches are tender, that the words they whisper in his ear-- _beautiful creature, my darling, dear boy_ \--make it better for him; they tell themselves that the way they touch him is tender, not covetous, and that if given the chance, they’ll pull him out of this life and off the street to keep him forever, a pretty, willing counterpoint to their wives. 

These are the men who want to know his real name so they can pretend they know him, that he chose this, that he’s speared beneath them because he desires them as much as they want him. Men like that want to believe that he means what he says when they’re inside him, every word-- _it_ _feels good, don’t stop, please--_ when they know as well as he does that everything he says is expedient, a lie designed to speed up time so they’ll come and he can leave.

They’re more reluctant to pay than the men who lead him into alleys because it ruins the illusion, doesn’t it? You wouldn’t pay a boy who really loved you; you wouldn’t have to, and sometimes they get rude about it. He’s had to pull out a knife. 

True, he’s stumbled into the street with a black eye and empty pockets before, devoid of his pay and his dignity, but that was ages ago. He’s gotten a lot better since. He can read people better, that’s one thing, and he isn’t quite as desperate for cash. He can be a little choosier with his clients, these days.

Which was why he’d let the man on the tram alone for so long, let him stare without giving him any hint that things might lead anywhere. He hadn’t even noticed him the first few afternoons; he’d been tired, worn out by the bullshit of the factory, the mindless, aching work that left his fingers swollen and his head encased in a dull ache. It was hard to believe he’d spent years there working six days a week; he was down to three now and it was awful, the way it whited out his brain and robbed him of his senses. The world seemed so colorless when his shift was over, when he stumbled onto the street and ran towards the tram, away, anywhere but there, anyplace where he couldn’t hear the endless hum of the machines. He hated every second inside those doors; his _m_ _utter_ had, too, and she’d died there, in the throes of the thing that she hated, worn down by it, destroyed by it, and he was damned if he’d live his life like that.

So he sells his body to strangers and banks away their notes and one day, he tells himself every morning, blue eyes sharp in a clouded mirror, he won’t belong to a soul but himself.

“Blue eyes,” Obi-Wan says softly. His fingers are hanging between them, tracing the planes of Anakin’s face. “I’ve always liked blue, all its different moods. Yours are like a lake right now, did you know that? A lake in the spring near where I grew up. Maggiore. That’s it’s name.”

“You really wanna talk about my eyes right now?” He rocks down, rubs himself against Obi-Wan’s heat. They're stretched out in Obi-Wan's bed. “I could’ve sworn you wanted something else.”

Gentle fingers on his bare chest don’t bely the growl in Obi-Wan’s throat. “I want you.”

“You have me,” Anakin says. He turns his mouth into a smirk. “You going to do anything about it?”

It’s a goad, that line, one that usually works. Usually, he’d run his mouth like that and get slammed on his back for his troubles, his trousers yanked open and a thumb at his opening, pressing, eager, testing. There are lines that come after that one, too, lines he can use to get two fingers inside him and the client slicked up and then whole mess over in fifteen minutes flat.

But Obi-Wan doesn’t do any of that.

He simply blinks up at Anakin, his eyes like brand-new candles. “I want to see you,” he says. “Every inch of you, Anakin. Would that be all right?”

Anakin frowns. "You don't have to ask like that. I'm here, aren't I? We both understand the arrangement. You can do whatever you want."

"Well, then." He brushes Anakin's hair from his eyes. "Humor me. I want to ask."

“So all you want to do is look, huh?" Anakin swallows. There's an odd flutter in his chest. "Come on. You want to do more than look, Obi-Wan.”

“Of course I do.” Nails at his neck, gently biting. “I want to be inside you. I want to watch you take my cock and feel you squeeze me when you come.”

“Yeah? You think you can make me?”

Obi-Wan make a low, hungry sound. “I know I can.”

“But you want to look at me first, is that it?”

“I do.” He pushes and Anakin bends to him, takes the kiss that Obi-Wan offers. “Very, very much. May I?”

Of course Obi-Wan wants to play at love, he thinks as he swings unsteadily off the bed. He’s an artist, after all, a painter; by nature, a real romantic type. Even the way he'd stared at Anakin on the tram had had an air of that, a kind of appreciation instead of just lust.

Still, what’s more surprising, he realizes as he climbs unsteadily off the bed, is that the prospect of that game doesn’t annoy him like usually does. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t planning to pull tonight, anyway; he’d worked a full day already on the line and he was tired, or he had been, when he'd climbed aboard the tram and taken his seat. So he won’t lose anything by staying the night. 

Or maybe it’s because he likes Obi-Wan’s rooms, the pleasant jumble of them. The smell of paint and lavender and the neat, tall stacks of books. He can picture Obi-Wan moving around them, fussing with the teakettle or sitting at the window with a book. He wonders what the man looks like when he paints.

Or maybe, he thinks as he reaches for the catch of his trousers, suddenly aware of their heat, it’s because Obi-Wan is a beautiful man. Even on the tram, in the grey light of fading day, he'd stood out like spun gold in a mountain of hay, but now, tousled and aroused with his hands folded behind his head, his eyes catching the lamplight, his shirt open to the furred plains of his chest, he takes Anakin's breath away. It’s been a long time since he took the time to look at the men who were fucking him--even longer since he’d wanted to. He knows what he'd find he if bothered, anyway: shiny cuffs and tarnished wedding rings and a sunken desperation in the eyes. But Obi-Wan is different. Obi-Wan glows, something as lovely inside as there is out. There has to be, for him to have made a picture like the one in the front room, the one that feels like falling, like being on the edge of something great. Maybe that's why now, as Obi-Wan stares at him, Anakin can't help looking back.

“Oh, _lieb_ ,” Obi-Wan says, his voice thick. Anakin’s cock jerks at the words. “Look how lovely you are.”

He aims to sound arrogant. It doesn't quite work. “I am, aren’t I?”

“Tch. As you very well know.”

He fists himself because he wants to. And because he wants to see the look on Obi-Wan’s face. It's glorious. There are eyebrows and teeth.

“Anakin, come back here.”

“Why?” Another stroke, a pointed little grin he doesn’t have to fake. “You can see just fine from there, I think.”

“I can,” Obi-Wan says, strained, “but I’d much rather not.”

“And you want to touch me.”

A groan. “And I want to touch you. Desperately. As if that were not inherently obvious. There, are you happy?”

“No,” Anakin says. He steps forward just enough for the tips of Obi-Wan’s fingers to kiss the side of his thigh. “Mmmm, not yet. Got any ideas about that?"


	4. Chapter 4

The boy is a wonder.

The boy is also a brat.

“Obi- _Wan_ ,” he says in that kiss-bitten way of his, one arm bent above his head and the other caught in the sheets. “Touch me.”

He drags his fingers up Anakin’s calves and over his knee. “Tsk. I am.”

“Not anywhere interesting. Do you need-- _oh_ \--do you need some suggestions?”

“No, _Lieb_.” He strokes the curves of Anakin’s ribs, lets his thumbs count them, grins when the boy bites off another gasp. “Would you like me to stop? I will if you want me to. Am I boring you?"

Anakin glares at him. His back arches and his furious cock bounces but, to Obi-Wan’s continued delight, he doesn’t let go of the game. Determined to have his obedience rewarded, maybe, or an obstinate need to defy Obi-Wan’s every expectation. Regardless. The boy is a marvel: too skinny and perfectly rounded by turns, each line that Obi-Wan touches both unexpected and exact. In the soft shadows of the lamp, he’s shivering, they both are, with every twitch of the bed, the air between them fills with color: the flush of Anakin’s cheeks, long since spilled to his chest; the burn of his eyes, a snapped match; and the glorious gold of Anakin’s skin. He seems to glow wherever he’s touched. More than art, this creature, he thinks, half-mad with desire, more than mere inspiration: the boy is a masterpiece.

The boy who is writhing beneath him and trying desperately not to. The boy who wants to stay in control. The boy whose voice, despite its hiss, sounds as desperate as Obi-Wan feels: “Does it look like I’m bored?”

Obi-Wan bends his head until his mouth finds the firm valley of Anakin’s breastbone and drags it up and up and up to the taut bow of Anakin’s neck, damp with sweat. “You look,” he whispers, “like something from Olympus. An old god in a new body who’s been cast back down to earth, a living piece of divinity sent to walk among us, to remind us of our fealty, to remind us how to worship--that’s what you look like, darling.”

A whimper, small and lovely. “Is that what you’re doing, then? Worshipping? Because I’d really rather get fucked.”

“My darling.” Soft words that taste like silver, words he molds to the heat of Anakin’s cheek. “The way you look right now, there is nothing I'd rather do than spend the rest of forever paying you obeisance.”

Before Anakin can answer, Obi-Wan’s fingers are between his thighs, arrows, and the boy nearly flies off the bed.

“Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan, please.”

He rocks against the boy’s thigh. “Please what, _Lieb_?”

“Please.” Long fingers in his hair, pulling; the sweetness of a deep, drowning kiss. “Obi-Wan, please. Worship me from inside.”

There is oil. More kisses. The sound of Anakin’s laughter when Obi-Wan at last tears off his own pants.

“I think you lost a button.”

“Only one,” Obi-Wan says, reaching for the oil. “And you needn’t look so proud about that. They were already in need of a mend.”

“Yeah?” The challenge is back in Anakin’s eyes, glinting up from the pillow, brighter still when Obi-Wan leans over him, presses himself between Anakin’s thighs. “Is that so?”

“Anakin.” It rolls off his tongue, a purr.

The boy’s knees brush his sides. “Hmmm?”

“Do shut up.”

When he pushes in, Anakin opens for him, and then and then there is only this in all of the universe, only now, only here, only them.

Anakin claws at his back; the sounds coming out of him are torn and triumphant.

“More, Obi-Wan,” he says in the white space let between them. “Fuck me hard, just like that, god. _More._ ”

He is so tight inside, slick, too, and velvet, and his mouth when it finds Obi-Wan’s is the same, oh, it’s the same, like kissing fire, each stroke of the boy’s tongue like a flame.

The bed is shrieking, their bodies rattling its bones. It sounds determined to wake the dead. And Anakin, too, is loud, his cries leaking through their kisses as Obi-Wan fills him, as the boy’s hand strips his own dick.

“Gonna come,” Anakin spits, the words filled with starlight. “Don’t stop Obi-Wan don’t stop don’t stop, fuck, I’m gonna--”

Then he’s silent, pliant, every bend and curve of his body going beautifully, furiously slack as he empties himself against Obi-Wan’s stomach, but Obi-Wan doesn’t come then, oh no; he grits his teeth and digs into the sheets and makes himself watch:

The flutter of Anakin’s mouth, the way it falls open, searching, searching for words that he can’t get across.

The tip of his chin, pointed eagerly towards the unseeing sky. The way his lids open slowly, shyly, and smile into Obi-Wan’s eyes.

The arch of his neck as he leans up to rub their mouths together, his nails biting gently into Obi-Wan’s hair. 

“Look at you,” Anakin whispers, the voice of a butterfly. “God, you’re beautiful, Obi-Wan. Look at you.”

He comes with Anakin’s words pressed to his lips, with the boy’s hands cupping greedily at the curves of his ass, with a fervor that makes him say the boy’s name over and over until the sounds are overlapping and his cock gives one last, desperate jerk, trying to spurt again.

“Oh god,” Anakin breathes, his hips rising to meet Obi-Wan’s. “Yes.”

They lay together a long time, stretched out in the softening heat of the bed. Even when Obi-Wan pulls himself free, reluctant, and tumbles to his side, Anakin curls up against him, his face tucked into Obi-Wan’s neck, his arm thrown over Obi-Wan’s hip.

Obi-Wan kisses the boy’s hair. “Do you want to sleep, godling?”

“Mmm.” A low, contented sigh. “Can I sleep here?”

“I wish you would.”

Obi-Wan can feel Anakin smile. “Yeah?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Thank you.” He nuzzles Obi-Wan’s ear. “I like it here. ‘S nice.”

He strokes Anakin’s shoulder, marking the jutting line of bone. “Good.”

He should get up and turn down the lamp. He should get up and lock the front door. He should get up and find the notes he’ll use to pay Anakin for his time, and send him away.

But it feels too good to hold him and he’s not ready to let go of tonight, of Anakin. He doesn’t have to, Obi-Wan tells himself, tipping their foreheads together and breathing in the sound of Anakin’s breath. No, he doesn’t. Not yet.


	5. Chapter 5

When he opens his eyes to a dove-gray dawn, the boy’s gone.

He isn’t smoking in the front room, as Obi-Wan’s heart first hopes, or curled in the threadbare armchair by the stove, chased away by Obi-Wan’s snores. He isn’t smoking by the window or standing in the shadows chuckling while Obi-Wan struggles to put on his pants. 

No, Anakin isn’t anywhere. There’s no sign of him.

Except, when the sun finally breaks in through the frosted windows, there’s a note.

It’s stuck between the doorframe and the wall right next to the painting that Anakin had admired, a half-folded piece of paper, thick; torn from one of Obi-Wan’s sketchbooks, he thinks. 

He unfolds it in the sunlight in his bare feet, the chill thick around his ankles--but it’s the foolish feeling in his heart that makes him shiver as he reads:

_I didn’t want to wake you. You can pay me next time; tomorrow or the next day at 8? ~ A_

“Yes,” Obi-Wan says once. And louder, again, through a smile so wide that it makes his face ache. “Oh, _yes_.”

______________________

It’s a mistake, going back there. Anakin’s sure of it.

Or at least that what he tries to tell himself as he ducks out of his rooms and turns up his collar and sets out for Obi-Wan in the dark.

It's mistake to sidestep one of his regulars, a mousey banker with sweaty palms who likes to have his mouth on Anakin's cock, to spent time with a man who he’s almost certain can't pay him what he’s worth.

Not that the banker does either, though; he’s annoyingly thrifty. For a man who could bath in marks if he wanted to, he’s a skinflint sometimes, when his conscience tells him to be. Sometimes, he feels guilty after he comes all over the floor and his fist, just from kissing Anakin’s cock; Anakin can tell when the payout will be skimpy when the man’s sniffling as he carefully close Anakin’s trousers. On the thinnest nights, he cries.

“My wife,” he’ll say, red faced, as he presses not enough bills into Anakin’s hand at the door. “She’s been asking questions about expenses and such and oh, my darling, I’ve betrayed her quite enough.”

He’s a _darling_ , this banker. A _sweet boy_ or a _love_ , sometimes, on their rare occasions when he wants Anakin to come, when he wants Anakin to say pretty things about how it’s never felt so good before, about how hot the man makes him, about how horny it makes him to watch the banker drink down his come.

On those nights, his face is the one that’s red at the man’s office door, painfully aware of how silent they are now that everyone’s gone home, even the lowliest, shiny-cuffed clark.

“You’re so beautiful,” the banker will say, the weight of notes heavier as he presses them into Anakin’s hand. “My love, you’re so beautiful like this.”

And he’ll turn his arm around the banker’s neck and kiss him, then, despite the bitterness. “It’s because of you,” he’ll murmur. “You make me beautiful, sir.”

It’s one of the few things about what he does that makes him feel dirty, having to lie like that, in words. He can make his body say anything it needs to, anything the men who pay him want to hear. But words for him are a sacred thing, instruments of beauty and power. They were for him once, while his mother was still alive, when he still had time for books and wonderment and reflection and would scrawl words of his own, watch them spill from the point of his pen. When he was satisfied, he would read them to her after supper, when she sat with a needle and thread, and what he loved most about her was that she hadn’t liked them all and had told him so, gently, so that he might put them under his pen again and rework them until in his ear, they felt right.

He hasn’t written for a long time; hasn’t want to. For the longest time, truly, Anakin hadn’t thought about poetry at all.

Until he’d held a pen to paper at Obi-Wan’s the other night. He’d heard the words’ voices then. He hasn’t been able to shake them all week.

They murmur to him about the smell of cigarettes, of spunked sheets. The soft turn of Obi-Wan’s mouth.

The trail of Obi-Wan’s fingers over his skin, tender; gentle even as they fucked.

And god, the look in Obi-Wan’s eyes. That’s what’s confounded him most, what’s chased him, what he’d peered into his client’s faces last night stupidly hoping to see: adoration, maybe. Or even an echo of affection, something more than lust or desire, because Obi-Wan’s eyes--blue and bright and never-ending--had been full of joy to see _him_ , that’s what it had felt like, and proper payment or no, Anakin wants that again.

Even so, in the moment, as he’d scribbled while Obi-Wan snored, the note had seemed like a mistake, like he was giving into something foolhardy and silly. He’d told himself it was just good business practice; he’d provided a service, a damned good one, and he deserved to get paid. Never mind that leaving Obi-Wan sated and sleeping had seemed like a better idea than asking right then for his money, which was what he should’ve done, wasn’t it? It’s what he’d always done before when a client had dozed off, after, when their time was officially up and Anakin was impatient to fucking go home.

It was that impatience that’d been missing with Obi-Wan; some part of him really hadn’t wanted to leave. He’d wanted to lay in that old narrow bed, drifting, warm and sticky and good until Obi-Wan had woken up and smiled at him again, kissed him again, until neither of them had any goddamn interest in sleep.

He hadn’t wanted to leave, but he’d had to. That’s what he’d told himself. So the note, as silly as it was, had been a kind of personal compromise: the promise of seeing Obi-Wan again, sure, but on very specific terms. However light Obi-Wan’s pockets might be, tonight, Anakin tells himself as he slips off the street and up the stairs of Obi-Wan’s building, he’s getting paid.

And if it’s not enough, he can make up. An extra blow job tomorrow, maybe, or a quick unzip in an alley on his way home while his skin’s still humming from Obi-Wan’s hands, while he can close his eyes and still smell Obi-Wan’s body and imagine those whiskers cutting into his cheek, hear the man’s low cries in his ear--yeah, sure. No problem. He’ll make it up.

His heart’s pounding when he reaches Obi-Wan’s door. He tells himself he’s the climb up the stairs.

When the door opens, though, he knows that it’s not.

“Anakin!” Obi-Wan says, beaming, bending out into the dark hall with a smear of green on his cheek. “You’re here.”

“Yeah.” He’s grinning back; he can’t help it, damn it. “So you gonna let me in?”

“Let you?” Obi-Wan snatches at his hand and pulls, slams the door behind him and crowds him up against it. “I _insist_.”

Two kisses like that, his back biting wood and Obi-Wan’s tongue in his mouth and Anakin’s head feels like a goddamn balloon. Another three and he’s rutting against Obi-Wan’s thigh.

“I want you,” he hears himself spit between kisses. “Jesus, I want--”

And then Obi-Wan’s cupping his cock and humming against his mouth, chuckling. “What do you want, _Lieb_? Tell me. It’s yours.”

It’s not supposed to be like this. He’s not supposed to want it. He’s supposed to be able to stand back and be detached. His head isn’t supposed to be a whirlwind; he isn’t supposed to feel desperate, like he might implode if he doesn’t get Obi-Wan’s hands on his skin. That’s what clients are supposed to feel like, not him. What the hell has this man done to him?

He knots his fingers in the back of Obi-Wan’s shirt. “Obi-Wan.”

A purr, a nuzzle at his throat. “Anakin.”

He looks into those lovely, matchstick eyes and sees his own reflection painted there, wild. Whispers: “Please, Obi-Wan. Suck me off.”


	6. Chapter 6

The room is a mess. There are torn pages everywhere, a half-dozen finished sketches; he has the easel up and a swirl of color on his palette and when he goes to the door, Obi-Wan is ready to explain that it's Anakin, it's Anakin, it's all for him, all of it--but the boy doesn’t want to hear any of that.

What Anakin wants is to writhe like a kite under Obi-Wan’s kisses. He wants to snap into Obi-Wan’s hands and push his pleasure against the paint-splattered turn of Obi-Wan’s trousers and beg and beg, ever so softly: “Please, Obi-Wan. Suck me off.”

He doesn’t notice how cold the floor is here, how his knees are tickled by the chill creeping under the door because Anakin is one long solid line of heat above him, before him, and oh God, the sounds that he makes when Obi-Wan opens him up, the way his hips eagerly rise--and when Obi-Wan nuzzles the soft steel and lifts up his eyes, the sweet helpless heat that he finds.

 _This is good_ , Obi-Wan thinks, drawing the boy in sure and deep. _This is good and beautiful in all the ways that really matter and surely God is on our side, isn't he, or else how would I have found Anakin, of all the people in this city? How would he have found me?_

The boy still wearing his coat. He's still wearing his coat and his face is a firestorm, a mottled collection of desire and heat, and he’s leaking, groaning, trembling, fucking eagerly into Obi-Wan's mouth, his fingers wound in Obi-Wan's hair.

“Obi-Wan,” he manages, the words a wire pulled tight. “Just like that. Oh, please. I’m gonna come. Let me come. Please let me--”

And when he does, when Obi-Wan tastes that first shock of soft bitter, he tugs his head back and the boy out and takes the rest of Anakin’s spunk on his face and Anakin howls then, a thrash of a sound that rings in Obi-Wan’s ears long after Anakin’s dragged him to his feet and kissed him through the mess and frog-marched him fast to bed.

“I like that,” Anakin says, smoke against his throat. “Seeing myself on your face.”

“Did you?” Obi-Wan squirms. He’s hard as hell and Anakin’s on top of him, skin to skin. He’s not going to last very long.

“Mmmhmm. You looked like you belonged to me.” 

Something in Obi-Wan’s chest swells like a sail fed by the wind. “And that’s a pleasant idea to you, is it?”

Anakin chuckles and bites at his ear. “Eh, you know. I don’t mind it.”

He comes with Anakin’s hands dug into the soft flesh of his thighs, with his hands on Anakin’s shoulders and his cock shoved into the rough velvet of Anakin’s mouth until he’s filling it with seed and Anakin is groaning around it, grinning, bobbing his head and swallowing the whole mess. Then he’s straddling Obi-Wan’s hips and he’s stroking himself furiously, his eyes caught in Obi-Wan’s the whole time, and when he lets go, Obi-Wan’s beautiful boy, the arch of his back is an exquisite parallel to the curved line of his throat as pleasure overtakes him and he spends himself on Obi-Wan’s chest with a soft, greedy cry and what Obi-Wan feels in his heart--delight, certainty, a thing in the shape that is love--is a storm of its own.

*****

Later, when Obi-Wan’s wrapped a sheet around his hips and brought wine to bed, one bottle and two glasses, Anakin says:

“What’s going on out there?”

“Hmmm?”

“All that paper everywhere. It looks like a mill exploded in your sitting room.”

“Oh.” Obi-Wan kisses the boy’s temple and takes another drink. “That, my dear, is art. Or the beginnings of it.”

A snort. “Really.”

“Yes. I’ve been working all day. Since last night, in fact. Huh, or the night before. I’m not sure”

Anakin leans his head against Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “You always work like this? In a frenzy?”

“Sometimes. When the muse calls, I’m obligated to answer. And she and I haven’t been on speaking terms as of late.”

“Why not?”

A longer sip, a second. “Because I send her away one too many times, I think. She got rather tired of being ignored.”

The boy’s gone still next to him. “Why’d you ignore her, then?”

“What I was inspired to paint didn’t please my masters. So I tried to paint like somebody else, I suppose, the kind of artist I thought they wanted. But that was, by their accounting, even worse.”

“You can’t do that.”

“What?”

Anakin sits up, his eyes bright, his empty glass bobbing in his hand. “You can’t try to make something that isn’t yours, Obi-Wan. Come on. When you do that, when it doesn’t come from you, then it’s not art, is it? It’s just, I don’t know, soulless repetition that can’t speak to or move anybody, especially you, and if what you make doesn’t speak to you, then who the hell else is going to care? Nobody, that’s who.”

“Is that so?”

“ _Yes_.” Anakin looks so put off that Obi-Wan has to bite back a smile. “You’re the artist, don’t you know that?”

“I do now. But I’ve had to learn it the hard way.”

“Hmph.”

He touches Anakin’s cheek. “I wish my masters had spoken as plainly as you.”

The boy’s expression softens. “Yeah?”

“Mmm. Maybe I wouldn’t have spent the nine months questioning myself. Maybe I’d simply have left.”

“Left where? School?”

“Yes. And maybe Germany, too. Perhaps I’d have packed up my paints and gone home with both my artistic integrity and my sense of self-worth intact.”

Something ripples over Anakin’s face, a boulder tossed into a duck pond. “Well, fuck your masters, but I’m glad you didn’t leave.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Because then you wouldn’t have met me.”

Obi-Wan chuckles. “True.”

“And,” Anakin says, plucking Obi-Wan’s glass away and downing the last, “you found your muse again, didn’t you?”

The words slip out before Obi-Wan can stop them. “You say that as if they’re two separate things.”

Anakin stills again. His eyes catch the lamplight. “I’m your muse?”

“Or my inspiration, if you like.” His face heats. God, he sounds foolish; suddenly feels like it, too. “Does that, er. Does that bother you?”

“I don’t know. Should it?”

“I don’t know.” He scrubs a hand through his hair, rueful. “I’ve never been in your position, I suppose.”

The boy’s lips twitch. “You’ve never inspired anyone, Obi-Wan?”

“Me? I very much doubt it.”

Anakin looks away for a moment, looks back. “Hmm. Well. Can I see it?”

“See what?”

“The art I’ve inspired.”

“It’s not done.” He swallows back panic. “None of it. I mean, I’ve only just started on canvas; it's mostly sketches.”

Anakin sits back, the air of the imperious. “I don’t care,” he says. “I want to see what you’ve made of me.”

“But--!”

“No buts, Obi-Wan.” The boy’s smile’s a blade that slices Obi-Wan’s heart, hot. “You owe me, remember? So come on. Let me see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some stories I write have a plot and others, like this one, seem content to meander about on their own. Ah well.


	7. Chapter 7

He smokes while Obi-Wan sorts. Both are very serious business, it seems.

Obi-Wan is damned fussy about it, to start; there’s a lot of flying paper and muttered curses, all of it softened by the lovely lines of his body and his mussed hair as he dives into the pile on the settee.

“I’m not expecting perfection,” Anakin calls from behind a long drag, trying not to smile at the view. “You’re making too much of this.”

Obi-Wan laughs. “Well, good, because there’s no perfection to be found here. Far from it.” He chucks a handful of sketches over his shoulder; they flutter meekly to the floor. “Perfection and I are old enemies, Anakin. We’ve had many battles before.”

Huh. “You don’t think art should be perfect?”

“I think,” Obi-Wan says absently, his fingers lost in charcoal dust, “no, I know that if I set out to make something perfect, all I’ll manage is to make nothing at all. That’s what sketches do for me, you know? They let me get the ideas out without worrying about how they should fit together. _Ah!_ ” He stands up triumphantly, waggling a piece of paper in the air. “I knew you were somewhere, my shy darling. There we are.”

He scoops up the stack he’s built on the carpet and sweeps into the bedroom with a flourish. “Shall I lay them out for you?”

His smile’s contagious. “ _Bien sur_ , sir. Please do.”

Obi-Wan lays the sketches out like titles across the tangled bedclothes, a shadowed mosaic that runs from the ridge of Anakin’s knees to the very edge of the bed. When he’s done, each page in its proper place, he turns back to Anakin and cups his cheek, kisses the crown of his head, whispers:

“I’ll be curious to know what story they tell you, _Lieb_.”

First he sees his knee, bent gently to the side, a suggestion of his bare thigh above it. Then there’s his neck, the back of it, the wild tangle of his damp hair. Then his fingers, five of them, turned in a claw in the sheet. There is the low curve of his back, a hint of his ass; the gentle ladder of his ribs climbing his side. And there is his smile, broad and free and undeniably beautiful, crowned by the sharp tip of his chin.

What strikes him most, though--what has the last of his cigarette burning his fingers and his face hot with unshed tears--is that what Obi-Wan has made of him is not pornographic or exploitative. He doesn’t look at these images of his own nakedness and feel cheap. No, he doesn’t look like a whore in Obi-Wan’s sketches; he looks like a man someone _loves_.

“Ah,” Obi-Wan says softly. “Do you not like them, then? I’m sorry. I know they’re a bit of a mess, but that, I’m afraid, is my process and I--”

“Obi-Wan.” He has to fight to keep his voice steady.

“Yes?”

“They’re beautiful.”

When he looks up, Obi-Wan is staring at him, delighted. “Really?”

“You know they are.”

“Well,” Obi-Wan says, “they’re the start of something wonderful, anyway. It’s a long way from here to a finished canvas.”

He reaches out and squeezes Obi-Wan’s fingers. “But you’ve already started a painting, haven’t you?”

“I couldn’t help it.” Obi-Wan’s other hand finds his face. “I was hopelessly inspired by this lovely creature I hated to let out of my sight.”

Anakin closes his eyes and leans into Obi-Wan’s palm and thinks: _Oh, Obi-Wan. I didn’t want to leave you_.

Which is precisely why he should not have come back. Because now, how can he make himself turn away from this man--a goddamn client, not a man--who’s eaten up two nights of his life and not recompensed him in anyway except to make him feel like he’s worth more than the weight of any wallet, that what he wants in return for his affections isn’t money. It’s love.

Obi-Wan’s lips on his forehead. “ _Lieb_? Are you all right?”

But he can't have that, can he? Not really. Obi-Wan may be a better man than the banker, the judge, the men who find him in alleys, but he's still a client, and clients get swept up, sometimes, and forget that they're only playing at love. Love isn’t the provenance of prostitutes, Anakin tells himself, it's their profession, and only a fool or a street corner virgin would believe anything otherwise.

Whatever he feels for Obi-Wan, then, whatever he felt that first night when he picked up a pen, Obi-Wan can't feel the same way towards him. He may think he does now, with Anakin stripped down in his bed, and it may please him to think of Anakin as his muse, but what Anakin can see with sickening clarity is the invitable, crushing moment when the dawn comes and Obi-Wan looks at him in the light and sees the scars, the imperfections that Anakin has trained the shadows to hide, and when he looks up them, no matter how giving his heart, Obi-Wan won't want the real Anakin: he'll want the boy he's made on the page, and Anakin will never be that.

Oh god.

“I--” Anakin says in a rush, his heart a panicked thunder, “I have to go.”

“What?”

“It’s late. I have work in the morning, ah. At the factory.” He ducks out of Obi-Wan’s grasp. “Didn’t I tell you? I can’t stay.”

“It’s very late,” Obi-Wan says. Anakin can hear the bewilderment as he scrambles out of the bed; he can’t bear to look at it. “You shouldn’t be out there alone.”

“I’ll be fine,” Anakin says, yanking on his trousers. “I do it all the time.”

“Oh. Do you.”

He reaches for his shirt. “Thank you for this. All of this.”

“You’re very welcome.” A deep breath in and blown out. “But I suppose the welcome you’re looking for is rather more concrete, isn’t it? Give me a moment. I’ll find my wallet.”

At the door, he presses a bundle of notes into Anakin’s hand. The look in his eyes--in the quick glimpse that Anakin can manage--is terribly sad.

“Best of luck to you, Anakin.” Obi-Wan says formally, like they’ve only just met. Which they really have, haven’t they? Anakin tells himself. He’d do well to remember that.

“Thank you.”

“And thank you for your services.”

It’s like being struck; a blow he should have known was coming. “I--you’re welcome,” he says stiffly, his hands balled into fists. “Good night.”

“Indeed,” he hears Obi-Wan say as the door closes behind him and he’s left alone in the cold, quiet hall. “Good night.”


	8. Chapter 8

He drinks the second half of the bottle alone.

He sweeps his sketches to the floor and bundles himself in sheets stained with the scent of Anakin’s body and he drinks until the world starts to soften around him, until the edges of the night don’t hurt quite as much anymore.

_You looked like mine_ , the boy had said, and oh, the way that he’d smiled when Obi-Wan had kissed him, the way he’d demanded to be pleased at the door. There had been so much joy in him this evening that Obi-Wan had let himself believe--no, he had _believed_ , no permission needed--that Anakin wanted to wile away the hours in his company, that he’d have done so, payment or not.

He’d been sure of it.

Ever since he’d found Anakin’s note, there had been a seed of certainty in him, one watered by his every thought of the boy, every line on fresh paper, every single finished sketch--there was more at work in this, he’d been sure, than the transaction of money for sex.

Granted, he’d never gone to bed with a whore before, he thinks sourly now, as the bottom of the bottle beckons; perhaps it always feels real like this.

_No_ , some small voice inside him says. _It doesn’t_.

He’s always been a man quick to love, that’s true, but he can count on one hand how many times he’d felt his love returned in kind. And he’d felt that from Anakin, affection like a beacon; an eagerness, like his own, to adore.

“But what’ve you to show for it, then?” he asks the empty room, half-expecting an answer. One doesn’t come.

Sleep does, in time, after the lamp smokes and he has to get up and put out the light. Then there is moonlight on the sheets and the blessed anonymity of the darkness when Obi-Wan can the jagged tears of disappointment and fall into dreams that are absent of art.

  
____________

  
He spends two days like that, wallowing, tracing the corners of the day from inside the safety of his nest. He doesn’t draw. He doesn’t pick up a single color, no. He simply sits and stares at the images Anakin’s left on the backs of his eyelids and bids them to go away, go _away_ , but they refuse him. They linger. He stays.

And then he opens his eyes at three o’clock in the morning and hears the easel calling, a siren, as it once had in the old days, and he is helpless to resist it, to resist her, the muse, her voice so strong and clear in his ear: not words, but a feeling--the way it feels to be in the world without the comfort of Anakin’s kiss--and then, for many blessed, fevered hours, he doesn’t have to think; he needs only listen to the colors and bow to each stroke of the brush and feel and feel and feel.  
  


____________

  
  
“Well, Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon says after what seems like forever, his hands folded neated behind his back, his eyes pinned to the canvas, “may I say, it’s good to have you back.”

“Master?”

Qui-Gon looks over, his brows raised above his pince-nez. “This is work of the calibre of which you’re capable. I’m very pleased to see it again.”

The smile comes out before he can stop it. “As am I.”

“Are there more?”

“There are. Two smaller ones that are done and one about this size that’s halfway there, or so.”

His master steps back from the easel propped at the center of his office and reaches for his pipe. “And tell me: do they display a similar level of skill?”

“Yes.”

Those eyebrows again. “And the same...passion?”

If there’s color in Obi-Wan’s face, so be it. “I think so, yes.”

“Good.” A match struck, a sudden puff of tobacco. “May I keep this one for now? It’s important that the rest of the faculty should see it.” He chuckles. “Some of them in particular need a reminder as to why I’ve been so insistent about keeping you on.”

It’s so like Qui-Gon to dish out a compliment wrapped in a knife, but today, Obi-Wan’s too pleased with the state of things to care. “Yes, master. Of course.”

At the door, Qui-Gon says: “Bring me the other two next week, and anything else that you’ve finished by then. It would be instructive to see it all in one space, hmmm?”

“I will.”

His master pats his arm and stares a little pointed into his face. “Rest between now and then, too. And maybe wash your face. You look like you’ve been up for a week.”

Obi-Wan grins ruefully. “More like two, to be honest.”

“Eh,” Qui-Gon says, “so I would’ve guessed, but it seemed too impolite to say. And that time, if this is what you have made, it was worth the suffering, yes?”

He looks back at the canvas, the colors sewn by the bruises on his heart, and for a moment, he feels the ghost of Anakin’s smile on his neck, the claws of his soft, hot, eager cries. He feels the smooth plains of Anakin’s skin beneath his mouth, the fevered jut of his cock. He feels the sweetness of the need in the boy’s hands in his hair, the feathered whisper of Obi-Wan’s name, and he knows the answer to Qui-Gon’s question for certain, without a single, solitary doubt:

“Yes,” he says. “It was.”

“Mmmm. And what is its name, this piece? Or should I say it is as yet untitled?”

Obi-Wan digs his muffler from his pocket and winds it about his throat. “It’s called _Worship_ , master.”  
  
“ _Worship_ , eh?” Qui-Gon says approvingly. “I can see it in this. Yes.” He smiles, broader than Obi-Wan has seen him do so in ages, and reaches for the turn of the door. “Go back to your altar, then, Obi-Wan, and bow to it for me once more.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The return of Qui-Gon and yes, more angst. But a happy ending feels like it's drawing closer, yes?


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: One of Anakin's awful clients makes allusions to pedophelia here. Be warned.

The sound comes at midnight, when Anakin is loathe to be awake. 

It’s a whisper at first, a scratch of sense against the well of his ears that throwing an arm across his eyes and burrowing deeper into his bed can’t shake.

 _When I_ , the words say, for he knows that they are words. _When I_

_When I when I when_

He shifts again and winces, the aches in his body awakening. He’d seen a pastor tonight, just after evensong; the pastor was overeager, newly married (so he’d said) and yet inexperienced and he’d taken Anakin clumsily and far too fast. And then he’d wanted it again with his own seed to slick the way and Anakin had closed his eyes and negotiated an additional payment while the pastor’s hands stroked the bare curves of his ass.

“Can I see you again?” the pastor asked as Anakin dressed. “My wife will be in the country with her family most of next month. I could take my time with you then.” Anakin could hear the cogs in the man’s mind turning, cataloguing, planning. “Trust me, I’d make it worth your while, _Kind_.”

The man’s money was already heavy in Anakin’s pocket, double what Anakin had been promised. There was little doubt in his mind that it had come from the collection plate; he wondered faintly why he wasn’t bothered by that. Had he lost the rest of them, then, his last qualms? They’re been rules once, when he’d first started, a whole litany of them, and when those had quickly crumbled, what he’d clung to was what he told himself was his skill at the game--the sidelong glances, the subtle bounce in hips, the glee that came when a man he didn’t know looked utterly desperate to touch him and, in that moment before Anakin acquiesced, before he took the man’s hand or opened his fly, he felt more power than he’d ever known in his life.

But then there were men who didn’t wait, who assumed and who hurt him. There were men who didn’t pay him, men who spat on him, after. Men who said terrible things in his ear as they came, men who made him say them back, and men like the pastor, a goodly man in all appearance who coveted him for reasons, even if unspoken, that made Anakin sick.

“I’m not a child,” he said, pulling tight at his boots. “I’m 19.”

The pastor leered at him, leaned up from the rug that lay before the hearth in his office, the only warmth in the colorless room, and said: “But in the right light, you could pass for much younger, could you? From behind, as I took you, you looked--”

Anakin closed his ears and rushed for the door and only when he was outside on the street, battered by the first insistent flakes of snow did he realize he’d forgotten his coat.

And now, as he lays in bed at midnight, he can still feel that awful cold; the way the snow stung his face, the way his hands had gone numb, the way he’d shivered and cursed that damned man of god all the way home.

 _When I_ , the words sigh again, a different sort of snowdrift. _When I_

_When I_

_When_

It’s only gotten harder, the life that he leads, since he cut himself off from Obi-Wan. The first week, he’d thought, had been the worst. He’d taken a different tram, deliberately scuffed his feet and run late, and he’d thrown himself into more and more work. It was an immunization process, he’d thought; he couldn’t stand the idea of anyone but Obi-Wan touching him--an idea so precious it stung--so he needed as many hands on him as he could get. Men in beerhalls and men walking home from work. Men who simply wanted and he was there to provide. Men who didn’t care if he came.

It did nothing to repair the hole in his heart.

If only Obi-Wan loved him, Anakin, and not the man he’d captured on paper, he’d thought more than once as some stranger panted at his throat, then he would be in Obi-Wan’s arms now, that ginger beard biting playfully at his neck.

 _What is it you want, Lieb_? Obi-Wan would surely whisper. _Tell me. Anything, and it’s yours_.

 _You_. The voice in his head a sob, one that leaked out from his mouth as the man behind him found his climax. _Obi-Wan, please. Please. I want you_.

The first week had passed like that, and the second, and by the fourth, as the chill of February came, he’d sunk so far inside of himself, become so goddamn numb that he’d stopped hearing Obi-Wan’s voice, stopped feeling the echoes of those strong, careful hands every time he closes his eyes.

Or so he’d told himself. But what was this?

_When I_

_When I look_

_When I look at you, I see_

_I see_

_I_

He charges out of bed, oblivious to the cold, and rushes to the dresser, fumbles his hands over its top. Opens the second drawer and digs around inside.

_I see_

_I see_

His notebook's still there, and inside it, a pencil.

_I look at you_

_When_

And then the lamp is lit and he’s under the covers, shivering as he turns the pages, the faded sigils of his past, and finds a clean page. Writes without hesitation like his hand’s not his own:

 _When I look at you, I see all that I might become  
_ _A seed buried in soil  
_ _The sun, your smile  
_ _Your hand  
_ _And though no rose am I  
_ _Nothing beautiful or smelling of sweet  
_ When I look at you, I forget  
_And I see in me  
A bloom_

Anakin doesn’t read what he’s written. There isn’t time. Because the voice--the muse, isn’t that what Obi-Wan called it?--is in his fingers and speaking again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...ah, readers, be patient with me. Feels like there's one more chapter here.


	10. Chapter 10

There’s a letter propped against Obi-Wan's door one night in March. He almost doesn’t open the damn thing.

He’s tired, tired and keyed up and a little more than terrified, but it’s the sweet sort of terror, the one that come of nervous excitement in knowing what awaits on the other side. Tomorrow, the masters will come _en masse_ to his show: eight works in all, staged in the student gallery--staged and rearranged and staged again until he and Qui-Gon were both satisfied with the arrangement. Indeed, as he’d left the building tonight, he’d not imagined it, had he? There’d been pride in his master’s eyes.

“Go home and rest, Obi-Wan,” he’d said with one last, certain nod. “You’ve done well.”

But Obi-Wan hadn’t left straight away, he’d lingered, walking among his paintings in the lamplight. They seemed smaller than they had first on his easel, then leaning against the walls of his rooms; in the abstract, hung about the gallery, they were strangers. As he stepped closer, though, and let himself take in each one, he could see every brushstroke, remember every hesitation; see every place where two colors touched and were one. In each work, if he looked closely enough, he could remember the sketched lines that lay at each canvas’ center, echoes of the drawings he’d laid before Anakin: the curve of Anakin’s thigh, the soft dip of his back, the unabashed beauty of his smile as he gave a great sigh and laughed into Obi-Wan’s eyes and came.

And at last he’d stood before _Godling_ , the last one he’d painted, the one into which it seemed to him he’d thrown every scrap of his heart.

_What do you feel when you look at it_? he remembered asking Anakin that first night, when all things were still possible. _What feeling does it evoke in you?_

“I feel…” he said aloud in the silent gallery without fear of sounding foolish, “I feel as if I’ve gazed into the world and for the first time in my life, not found myself wanting.”

He belonged here. For the first time in years, he believed that.

But he believed a lot of things, sometimes, he’d thought as he blew out the lamp. He’d believed that he and Anakin were the stuff of destiny, hadn’t he?

Well. He’d thrown his muffler about his throat and locked the gallery door behind him, a wave of sadness trailing at his heels. There was nothing he could do now about that. He’d no idea where Anakin lived, and he’d stopped showing up on the tram. No, the only way they’d come together again was if Anakin wished it, and he didn’t. That was that.

He plodded home, the wind frisky under his muffler. It would be spring soon, he’d thought, happy memories of warmth and green, but not yet; winter had dug her heels in and it would be a while before anything planted would find room to bloom.

As he’d climbed the stairs, then, his head was bit lighter, buoyed by thoughts of spring, of the many shades of green there would be to behold--and then, at his door: the letter.

He’s standing in his rooms now, frowning at the thing, at the neat, unfamiliar handwriting. It’s not a missive from his mother, at least; her scrawl he’d know at once. He sincerely hopes that it’s not a bill. And a rather thick one at that.

But why would a bill be propped against his door thus, and not crushed through the mailslot? he wonders. Hmmm.

He’s puzzled enough to open the damn thing right there in the moonlight just inside his front door. Bugger the lamplight.

He has to struggle to get the pages out of the envelope; his quick fingers count at least four, all crowned by a proper letter. Ah. He squints.

_Dear Obi-Wan_ , it begins.

_I am sending this with some reluctance, as I fear it may be salt in an old wound--or perhaps that is only my sense of self-importance talking. Perhaps you haven’t felt my absence from your life as keenly as I’ve felt yours._

Obi-Wan sits down abruptly. Happily, there is a chair.

_I’ve done a lot of foolish things in my life but walking out on you, on the fragile flame of what I believe that we had, was the damn stupidest of the lot. I’ve gotten terribly sentimental about it, which is annoying, not to mention inconvenient: to wit, I’ve not spent any of the notes that you pressed into my hands with that godawful look on your face that last night--not a single fucking mark. And I think of you all the time, never more so than recently, as Obi-Wan, dear one--how I loved it when you called me that--you’ve inspired me to seek solace in my pen._

_Enclosed are the first six or seven small efforts (or maybe five; I can’t quite tell how many this envelope will hold). I send these not because I hope you will like them but because you told me once that you’d never inspired anyone and that is plainly ridiculous. If you were only beautiful, maybe I could buy that, but you’re also kind and so very ready to love and somehow, in our brief acquaintance, one of the best men I’ve ever met._

_I hope to sell these soon, so if you see them in the paper or on some scrivener's row, you’ll know that they’re yours, Obi-Wan--in you, I have found every word._

_Yours, etc.  
_ _A_

He can’t see the lines anymore; is it the darkness, maybe, or his tears? No matter. One allows for the other. 

He lets the tears come for a time, does Obi-Wan. And then he reaches for the lamp.

He reads all six. Then reads them again. It’s to the last few lines of the first, though, to which he returns:

_And though no rose am I  
_ _Nothing beautiful or smelling of sweet  
_ _When I look at you, I forget  
_ _And I see in me  
_ _A bloom_

“You are beautiful,” Obi-Wan tells the page and the boy behind. “And I’ll be damned if I can’t show you that.”

There’s a return address on the envelope--saints be praised! All the better for the very mad ideas turning about in Obi-Wan’s head.

Tomorrow is the most important of his artistic life--perhaps of his _life_ , full stop. All the masters will be there, and his fellow students, ready to sneer at the first sign of weakness; he needs to feign at sleep, at least. He needs to be prepared.

“But what I need more,” he mutters, beaming, shoving the whole lot of papers into his trouser pocket and grabbing his coat, dashing for the door, “is you, and oh, Anakin, I won’t waste another night without you. My darling, I won’t.”

  
___________

  
Anakin is half asleep when the knocking jolts him awake. He’s half asleep and he’s seated at his desk and the jolt nearly tips over his ink.

“Damn it,” he sputters, pushing his chair back. Who the hell pounds on a man’s door at 10 o’clock at night? Whoever it is, he grumbles to himself as a knock comes again, it can’t be good news. The landlord, maybe? He's paid the rent up for the month. Or some damn fool client who followed him home? He shivers. Fuck, he hopes it isn’t that.

It isn’t his landlord. It isn’t a client. Except it is, sort of. It’s--

“Obi-Wan!”

The man looks like a fright. His coat’s not buttoned, the maniac, and he’s shaking with cold; his hair’s a fright, like he's run a marathon without his hat, and his nose is more red than flesh. But he’s also smiling, broad and never-ending, and Obi-Wan’s smile after all these weeks apart is one of the most beautiful things Anakin's ever seen.

“I got your letter,” Obi-Wan says cheerfully, waving a few pages about. “And your glorious poems. May I come in?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One last chapter to follow, if the fates allow.


	11. Chapter 11

He steps aside and then Obi-Wan is there, right beside him, his arms open and an ocean of joy on his face.

“You’re here,” Anakin mumbles, turning his face to the ice of Obi-Wan’s neck, clutching at the back of the man’s coat. “Oh, god, Obi-Wan. What are you doing here?”

“You didn’t really think you could send me words as lovely as these and then receive no reply, did you?”

“By return post, maybe.” He’s grinning now; it feels like he’ll never stop. “I sure as hell didn’t expect a madman at my door after midnight.”

“If I’m mad,” Obi-Wan breathes into his hair, long fingers creeping beneath the tattered hem of Anakin’s sweater, “then it’s because of your absence. How can I be expected to stay sane without sight of you?”

“I missed you,” Anakin says. He squeezes his eyes shut and says it again. “I’ve missed you, Obi-Wan. You don’t know how much. God, I fucked it all up, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Shhhh,” Obi-Wan says. “Enough of that. I’m here, aren’t I? And I wouldn’t be if not for your beautiful words. I could feel you in every one of them, darling.”

“That’s what I said. That’s how it felt when I wrote them.”

Obi-Wan’s mouth finds his, deep and warm and sweet, and oh, fuck, it makes the tips of his fingers tremble, it’s so good. “I have something to show you,” Obi-Wan whispers. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” He licks at Obi-Wan’s lips, playing at peevish. “Why not now?”

“Because now,” Obi-Wan says, firm and lovely, “if it’s alright with you, dear one, I’m going to make love to you.”

A lot of men have told him that before, in dark rooms like these. They’re whispered them against his throat as they tugged off his clothes and fumbled hurriedly with their own. They’ve been lies before, not for him but for his clients, men who tell themselves the sin is softened if they can tell themselves that it’s love.

But in this dark room, his, it’s as if Obi-Wan is speaking a different language from all those other men; he always has been, Anakin realizes as Obi-Wan pushes down Anakin to sit on the bed, every since the moment they met. The words may have been the same but the feeling behind them never has been; even that first night, when they were prostitute and client, Obi-Wan’s always wanted _him_.

How the hell hadn’t he seen that? he wonders, how could he have? Because even now, with Obi-Wan on his knees, those beautiful hands stroking the insides of his thighs, it’s almost impossible to believe.

“What are you smiling about?” Obi-Wan asks, his voice as soft as his touches.

Anakin slides his hands into that impossible hair and pulls Obi-Wan into a kiss, whispers: “Isn’t this reason enough?”

“Well.” A chuckle. “Yes. But.”

“But what?”

“But”--a scratch at his throat, whiskers untrimmed--“I’d like to give you a thousand reasons more.”

Anakin lifts his hips and snags Obi-Wan’s wrist above the tattered cuff, tugs that hand to find his heat. “A thousand, huh? All in one night? Big talk.”

Obi-Wan’s voice is feather-light, molten; it pools in Anakin’s heart. “One night, my darling?” he murmurs, squeezing softly, sighing at Anakin’s cry. “Oh, no. Oh no. It will take at least a lifetime, I think.”

And so it feels when he comes over Obi-Wan’s fist, loud and wanton; when Obi-Wan figures out they won’t both fit on the bed and pulls him and a tangle of blankets into a heap to the floor. It feels like a lifetime, staring up as Obi-Wan enters him into that beautiful, sweat-dampened face--god, the affection that’s strung there, the _care_. Fuck, it makes him writhe. 

“Yes?” Obi-Wan says, breathless. “Do you like that, dear one? Do you feel how much I’ve missed you? How much I need you?”

He reaches up and traces the curve of Obi-Wan’s jaw, his ears, the soft jut of his beard, and Anakin understands that he loves this man and that this man loves him and he can’t imagine anyone else’s hands on his skin ever again. And they won’t want to, will they? Oh no. They’ll look at his body and they’ll see traces of paint, the colors that Obi-Wan has painted into him with every touch, every kiss, every breath.

“I can feel it,” he says, arching his back to urge Obi-Wan to shove in deep. “I can feel it and see it, too. It’s all over your face.”

Obi-Wan groans, a sound like forever, a sound that rings in Anakin’s soul. “What is?"

A smile, soft fingers on Obi-Wan’s lips. “Oh, Obi-Wan. Dear one. You’re _mine_.”

___________________  
  
  
  


“Where are we going?” Anakin demands for the tenth time in as many minutes. “Obi-Wan, come on, you have to tell me.”

“No, I don’t have to,” Obi-Wan repeats, tucking Anakin’s arm more firmly beneath his own. “You agreed to this sight unseen and you can’t change your mind now.”

A grumble and a squeeze; Anakin leans into him--not too, just enough. “I’d just like to know what I’m walking in to, is all.”

“Something wonderful,” Obi-Wan says firmly. “Now come on, darling, we’re nearly late.”

It’s only when he leads Anakin onto the green that he realizes he’s wearing the same clothes as he was yesterday. They’re rather more wrinkled now, aren’t they, his shirt and his trousers? Ah. It might not be as noticeable if he and not Anakin were wearing his coat but, tch, it couldn’t be helped.

There hadn’t been time that morning to dash back home for a clean collar and unsoiled socks; there might have been, but instead, when the sun cut through the blinds and fell over his shoulders, there was also Anakin.

Anakin, who had stolen three-quarters of the blankets.

Anakin, who was curled at his side like a cat.

Anakin, whose bare skin bore evidence of Obi-Wan’s mouth, of his passion and who sighed like a wind chime when Obi-Wan turned his head for a kiss.

“Good morning,” he’d said against Obi-Wan’s lips.

He’d stroked his knuckles down one cool shoulder, cupped the other around the swell of Anakin’s ass. “So it is at the present, yes.”

Two strong arms around his neck and a twist and he’d found himself on his back with a warm and muzzy-headed boy straddling his thighs.

“I think you should have me again before breakfast,” Anakin had said, rubbing himself lazily against Obi-Wan’s thigh.

“Oh, should I?”

“Hmmm.” Anakin had nuzzled his throat and lapped at a bruise he’d dug the night before, high beneath Obi-Wan’s ear. “Once, I think. At least.” A hum. “After all, you’ve never had me in the morning before.”

Obi-Wan had laughed, the blood beginning to tingle under his skin. “Oh, is it a materially different experience, then, fucking you in the daylight?”

And then Anakin had risen up on his knees, the blankets draped behind him like a midnight’s cloak, and what a sight he was: pale skin and a twitching cock and eyes that shone bottle blue in the sun, the palms that held him aloft just skimming Obi-Wan’s chest. “I don’t know,” he’d said, his sleepy smile suddenly wicked. “Let’s try it and see.”

They had, twice, just to be sure, which was why they were late and why they hadn’t had breakfast and why Obi-Wan was half-dragging this beautiful, sullen creature to center stage of the most important day of his life.

“You’ll like it,” he says as their feet find the cobblestone path that leads them to the huge, dour building that has taken his blood, sweat, and tears. 

A side eye, a little smile. Anakin follows him through the great oak front doors. “Is there coffee?”

“Probably not.”

“Pastries or something?”

“No.” Anakin’s teasing him, he knows it, but it’s hard not to be flustered. Suddenly, he’s so goddamn nervous. “But you’ll like it just the same.”

Down the hallway, he can see: the gallery door’s already open. He can hear Qui-Gon laughing. There are people inside? Oh god. They really are late.

“How can you be so sure?”

Obi-Wan stops in the doorway. He has to. It suddenly seems important to spell out what this means, what they have. “Because, my dear,” Obi-Wan says in a rush--oh, how his heart’s pounding--“this is what I see when I look at you.”


	12. Chapter 12

Green and gold, that’s what Obi-Wan sees. Green and gold and acres of impossible blue.

“Red and pink at the heart of the matter,” Obi-Wan whispers in his ear. “When I look at you.”

They move, Obi-Wan’s paintings, as the one in his rooms had that first night. Then, Anakin wasn’t sure what he was supposed to see when he looked; now, what he knows is what he feels.

Acceptance. Joy in beauty he’s never seen in himself. The rainbow of Obi-Wan’s love.

“This is you, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says softly as they walk around the room, as the eyes of strangers watch them, as his own grow wet but fuck, he doesn’t care. “A bloom, in every shape, in every light. That is what I see when I see you.”

People come up to them then: some of Obi-Wan’s teachers. A classmate, and then another. And another. To each, Obi-Wan introduces him and to a man, they pay him no mind.

Except the man who comes up last, tall and hawk-nosed and imposing. Or he would be, if he didn’t smile as soon as he stretched out his hand and rumble out a laugh.

“I see you didn’t take my advice, Obi-Wan,” he says by way of greeting. “Unless you chose to sleep in your clothes?”

The tips of Obi-Wan’s ears color. “Ah, Master Qui-Gon. No, I did not.”

The master laughs again and claps him on the back. “Tsk. Never mind.” He turns to Anakin, hand extended, his gold pince nez picking up the light. “Something tells me, though, that you’re the godling.”

It’s like shaking hands with a mountain. “The, ah, what, sir?”

“The godling, the inspiration.” The master smiles. “The one who brought Obi-Wan back to the light. We’ve missed his talent here, you know, as has he. You’ve given us all a great gift.”

Obi-Wan makes a choked noise beside him. He has to swallow hard not to echo it. “I, ah. Thank you.”

“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, ah--?”

“Anakin. Anakin Skywalker.” 

The master bobs his head and gives him one last squeeze. “Anakin." He raises his eyebrows at Obi-Wan. “If an old man may be so bold...”

“Yes, master?”

There’s unabashed mischief in Qui-Gon’s face. “I think you were right to ignore my advice.”

It's overwhelming and strange and lovely, the whole afternoon, and as soon as they're free, Anakin tugs Obi-Wan down an alley and rains kisses all over that goddamn gorgeous face.

"So you liked it, then?"

"I loved it," Anakin says, his arms tight around Obi-Wan's neck. "I adored it, Obi-Wan." _I adore you_.

He doesn't say it but he does with a long, fevered kiss, a chain of them that he strings down Obi-Wan's throat and a catch in his own, a tear or two that he's not afraid to let come this time.

"I loved it," Anakin says again. "Thank you."

"Tsk, dear one," Obi-Wan says, a ring of roses at his eyes. "No. Thank you."

________________

Later, when the evening beckons, they eat supper by the stove in Obi-Wan’s rooms and drink too much wine, laugh too much, make love eager and sweet and Anakin passes out with a great fool smile on his face when he finally stops being stubborn and comes.

Later, when Obi-Wan wakes up alone in bed, it only takes a moment to discern that this time, Anakin hasn’t fled. Instead, he’s still in the low sill of the window, wrapped in a blanket in the silence of the night with a leatherbound book propped on his knees.

“I woke up with them in my head,” he says when Obi-Wan crawls out of bed and stands at his side, fingers moving over his shoulder. “It happens sometimes. They won’t let me sleep ‘til I get them out.”

“Will you read them to me?”

Anakin tips his head back, his hair falling in his eyes. “When they tell me what they want to be, yes.”

He leans down and kisses that dark crown, curls that smell of red wine and sweat. “Mmm, all right. I can wait until then. Shall I go back to bed?”

“You can stay if you want.” A soft hesitation. “Or maybe I can come with you?”

So that night, as he will for a thousand to come, Obi-Wan finds his dreams through the scratch of Anakin’s pencil, the turn of a poet, of the man that he loves, finding himself again on the page.

And when morning comes, Anakin’s head is on Obi-Wan’s shoulder and there’s a scrap of paper, carefully torn and settled in the nest of Obi-Wan’s chest.

This one says:

_The man on the tram is there today, his cheek pressed against the window_   
_And his eyes  
Oh, his eyes_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we have reached the end, at last! Cheers to all of your for your kind comments and cheerleading; without you, there's no question that this piece would have remained only a single chapter. Thank you, readers, for all that you do.


End file.
